


chasing the light

by skycatcher



Series: the mustafar intervention [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Eventual Happy Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Padmé Amidala Lives, Post-Order 66, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:42:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24789433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skycatcher/pseuds/skycatcher
Summary: Happy endings were never meant for clones; or perhaps clones were not meant for happy endings. But nothing has ever come easy for Rex and Cody — and it’s not going to stop them now.or; The war ends. Life goes on. Cody does the rounds. Rex tries to forgive. An S7E12 AU where Ahsoka and Rex’s Star Destroyer dropped out of hyperspace right over Mustafar.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, Padmé Amidala & CT-7567 | Rex
Series: the mustafar intervention [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979309
Comments: 43
Kudos: 354





	chasing the light

**Author's Note:**

> me: this is about rex  
> cody: *waltzes in playing a vuvuzela* heLLO

It’s that time again, the one every six months where Cody writes a lesson plan for the other instructor and signs out of the Temple, a small bag full of fresh produce from Coruscant’s best markets slung over his shoulder. Sometimes, Cody wishes there was less the Jedi had done for him and his surviving brothers, but Obi-Wan had been unrelenting. He shows his pass to the transport officer at the boarding gate, and when he steps back onto land he takes a path well-worn by his standard-issue boots.

The outskirts of Alderaan’s capital are framed by dramatic mountainsides and valleys, green in the summer and crisp-cold in the winter. Architecture is compact, to preserve heat, their only concession large windows open to the stillness of the planet’s second-largest natural lake. There Cody finds Rex and his tiny cabin amidst a lush, sprawling garden.

“Rex.” Cody places a hand on the front gate. It is an indulgent affair; small, painted, its existence an affront to the walls they stormed on Ryloth or the barricades around Umbara’s capital city. Yet somehow, Cody knows Rex would defend this land just as fiercely as any of the battlefields, when they were all that stood between their brothers and a certain death.

“Cody,” says Rex distractedly. “Has it really been six months?” He’s staking a creeper vine, hands gently tying twine around the drooping form. Its budding flowers are too heavy for its own weight to bear.

“Good to know you missed me,” says Cody dryly, as Rex cuts the string, and follows Rex into the house.

Rex drops into one of the chairs by the small square table. “Anyone important die?”

“No,” says Cody, which is more of a relief than it should be. “Any developments?”

“No,” says Rex. Their customary exchange of urgent news over, they can move to more frivolous matters. Rex pauses for a beat. “The twins are definitely Force-sensitive.”

Internally, Cody sighs, cataloguing a timeslot in his mental schedule of Obi-Wan’s activities. “Nothing unexpected, then.” 

Rex cocks his head. “It’s not what you think it is.”

“Accidental wanton destruction?” says Cody suspiciously. Upset Force-wielders had once been his and Rex’s specialty, after all.

“No,” says Rex, pursing his lips. “They can tell you things about yourself, how you’re feeling, things you didn’t even know.”

“You think it’s the Force?” says Cody. Cody will take his anecdotal evidence; Rex is not prone to judicious imagination. 

Rex considers this. “I think it’s the Force as it should be,” he says finally. “Open to emotion, but not...” He waves his hands around vaguely, “influenced.”

Cody thinks of all the Jedi and Sith he has ever known, the followers of their teachings stripped of humanity to act as a conduit for the Force. “Speaking of influence.” He reaches into his pocket and passes Rex a card. “It’s from a crèche child,” he adds, by way of explanation.

The Jedi Order had taken in as many war orphans as they could, Force-sensitive or not; the Temple was at capacity and bursting with life. Curious, young, healing life. Rex raises an eyebrow. “For me?”

Cody hesitates. “They know I come to visit you.”

“Yes, meddling Kenobi,” says Rex absently as he flips it open. It’s a picture, drawn by a youngling of undeterminable talent; two people, with the same face, eyes, smiles. “How’d they know we look alike?”

Cody could laugh, rare as Rex’s jokes are now, but he just says, “They know we’re brothers.”

“Ah,” says Rex. He stares at the card, contemplative. Cody takes the opportunity to hand him a large pink and yellow fruit from his bag.

“What’s this one?” says Rex, turning the fruit over in his hand.

“A meiloorun,” says Cody, retrieving a knife from the kitchen drawer and peeling it with the care of unfamiliarity. Obi-Wan’s recommendations were always good, and besides, any brother would do near anything to get their hands on food that wasn’t rations.

“Thank you, Kenobi,” says Rex piously. “Have you slept with him yet?”

Cody flushes. “ _Rex_.”

Rex just laughs.

His next stop is Rex’s neighbour. 

“Cody,” says Padmé Amidala Naberrie. “What a lovely surprise.” This joke, he hears every time. “Do come in.”

Sleep does not come easy in this corner of Alderaan, and it shows in the wrinkles at the corner of her eyes. It is ironic, to speak of hastened ageing and the burden of war to a clone, and Padmé — as she goes by now — has never been anything but astute.

Anakin had prostrated himself before her, on the hands and knees of his broken body, not to beg for forgiveness but to present his apology, whole and raw and scattered with pieces of his splintered heart. Anakin knew then, all too well, some things are not easily mended. 

Padmé had set her terms, and he had agreed; she had let her fingers linger on his face and then firmly bade him farewell. Only Rex and Cody had seen her cry. They had rocked her distressed children to sleep while her handmaidens attempted to comfort a kind of loss that is not measured but lived, and so Padmé had begun building life around a vacuum where happiness used to be.

Cody had not thought he had known happiness, but as with many things, he had been wrong. There had been no happiness in leading an army, and only adrenaline in fighting for his life; but there had been relief in carrying a wounded brother to safety, satisfaction in saving civilian livelihoods, and a quiet respect between the clones and the Jedi. 

The worst part, really, was knowing Rex had felt the same way.

“Uncle Cody!” screams a voice. Leia. She always knows when he arrives. Call it intuition; or her peering from the upstairs windows the moment he’d stepped out of Rex’s front door. She slides to a stop at his feet, but it is Luke, in her shadow, who says, “Did you bring us jogan-fruit?”

“Obi-Wan said meilooruns are particularly good this season,” said Cody, fishing two out of his bag and handing them over. 

Leia clutches the fruit with both hands. It’s bigger than her head. “Meilooruns,” she repeats, purposeful, turning back towards Cody for confirmation. Cody nods. Leia coos at its garish colouring and shows it to her mother.

Padmé would have eaten exotic fruit from across the galaxy when she was younger than Cody was now, but she gasps heroically all the same. Then she says, “Is that how we greet guests in this house?”

Abashed, Luke says, “Sorry, Uncle Cody. D’you want tea?”

Cody doesn’t hold back his laugh. “Leia dearest, could you fetch Uncle Rex?”

Rex might refuse to join him as he walks across the property line, but he cannot say no to Leia Naberrie.

+

_“It’s Anakin and Obi-Wan,” said Ahsoka, her eyes screwed shut with focus. They snapped open. “I need to go.”_

_She scrambled up to the gunner hatch and paused. Her lightsabers were missing from her belt. The ship lurched, and Rex jammed the stabiliser lever with desperation. The ship levelled, wobbling; they were no longer hurtling towards the surface at vaporising speeds. He cast a nervous look at the wreckage of the Star Destroyer above them, a safer distance away now._

_She caught his eye; her mouth had formed a thin, tense line. Rex nodded at her, and she was gone._

Rex wakes up.

+

“How is Obi-Wan?” asks Padmé, later, when the twins have been put to bed and Cody has produced for her a bottle of robust Nubian vintage — “you’ll have to thank Obi-Wan, really,” he had said, and artfully ignored Rex’s snort and her amused look — and poured them each a glass, at Padmé’s insistence. Rex lingers, as he tends to do now, not the days when he would have left them at sunset.

“All right,” says Cody. Obi-Wan had not slept much in that first year, powering through a restructure of the Jedi Order with a manic light in his eyes casting shadows in his heart. There had been no one to stand in his way; Mon Mothma had risen on the Petition of Two Thousand to chancellorship, and released the Jedi Order from their oaths to the Republic, until a time they could be remade.

The Temple established itself as a haven for the victims of war, and many of the clones had volunteered as their envoys, or tried to. Obi-Wan had extracted from the Senate a reparation bill for housing, income and medical treatment, and Cody still remembers Obi-Wan stalking the corridors rehearsing speech after speech with a feverish impatience, as though the time for waiting had been left behind in the shambles of the Clone War.

On his first paycheck, he had grabbed Obi-Wan by the wrist and thrown him, bemused, onto a civilian transport to Ragoon-6. They had spent two weeks wandering between the small settlements who still remembered when Jedi used to pass through with frequency, and if Obi-Wan had not found a semblance of peace there then Cody had been willing to concede that some things were impossible.

That was then; now, Obi-Wan had relinquished his authority on the Council to an honorary position, and spent weeks at a time travelling the Jedi outposts he had revitalised to deploy assistance across war-torn systems. Cody went with him, when it was convenient; not all his brothers had found solace as successfully as Rex. The Temple had been quick to offer him employment, and he spent his spare days training — well, it had started with hurt, rebellious teenage orphans, and had escalated to almost anybody. There was a reason Cody had been a much-respected commander, and he only too well understood the agency of being able to defend one’s body.

He still has nightmares about losing his mind. 

Now, Obi-Wan slept through the night, mostly; and if Cody missed their witching hour cups of tea, this was not the company to admit that in. 

Cody reconsiders. “Maybe better than all right,” he says.

+

Unlike so many other moments preceding this one, where Anakin’s mind is filled with a red rage and dark fog, this one is etched in with glass, unforgivingly clear and just as brittle. 

Ahsoka’s mouth is open, the fierce cry on her lips softening into wide-eyed shock, as Obi-Wan’s lightsaber passes through her stomach and Anakin’s through her chest. 

The moment is frozen, for a split second, for all eternity. 

“Ahsoka?” shouts Anakin. “Ahsoka!”

Time starts moving, fast; too fast. His brain scrambles madly to catch up. Her eyelids flutter. Their lightsabers clatter to the ground. How did she get here? There’s no time. Anakin catches her as she falls towards him, borne by momentum and gravity. _Stay with us_ , she whispers. 

Obi-Wan presses frantic hands to her wounds but there is no blood. 

There is no time.

+

Padmé says, “Have you been to see Anakin?”

Anakin Skywalker is in prison; one of his own design. Tried for war crimes, he petitioned for a lifetime of servitude in isolation. Obi-Wan had once again staked his life on Anakin’s, as — in Cody’s opinion — he did far too often. Cody could not begrudge him this one, the most inexplicable of them all: mass murderer to repentant citizen of the Republic. 

Many clones, after all, fell in a similar category, but the biochip scandal made their acquittal more palatable to the Senate, overwhelmed with evidence of insidious betrayal at every turn.

Cody says, “Not recently,” in truth, but produces from his bag its final contents, a clockwork bird in an intricate design. 

It is mostly inorganic; a curious prod with a multitool had told him its metal alloys are complex and varied. To work it would require an experienced hand. In a time of scarce resources and barely-stifled panic, it is likely the metal comes from the leftover sludge of melted-down war machines, discarded by refineries and junkyards, making its way to the long-neglected field of artistry. 

The reformed metal is chased with wood, sparingly used but tastefully delicate, and melded to shape an ascent into flight.

“It’s a phoenix,” says Rex, in awe.

“Here,” says Cody, placing the bird on the table in front of Padmé. “It’s for you and the children.”

“Is this from Anakin?” demands Padmé, quietly.

“No,” says Cody. “It was intended as a gift from me. They’re sold in the Coruscant markets.” Cody, in all honesty, had not known what he knows now. The figures were unmarked by a maker’s signature and an elegant gift; hardy, with moving parts that entertained small hands, but refined and understated were it to rest on the mantelpiece. The phoenix itself had become a symbol of the new Republic — fledgling, risen from the ashes of its aged bloated corruption.

He doesn’t say how he’d found Obi-Wan standing in the kitchen, turning the bird over in his hands, tears running unheeded down his face. Cody had left, buckled under the weight of a grief that did not belong to him. 

He says neutrally, “The funds go to the Temple crèche.” He’d checked. They did. 

Padmé reaches for it slowly, cautious as if it would burn her fingertips. “Anakin made it,” she says to Rex. Rex draws a sharp breath. 

Craftsmanship is sacred to the Jedi; it is built into their lightsabers and worn in the easy settle of the cloth against their skin. There is an unparalleled skill in the hands of the bird’s maker, and Cody does not tell them his eyes can see what the Force will not show him. 

The same touch resides in the oldest of the Temple caretaker droids, disappeared for a few cycles only to reappear, coaxed back to functionality. The latest round of adjustments recommended for pilots of the new-model Aethersprites. The analog puzzle boxes given to the hundreds of children that now called the Temple home, made to train dexterity and creativity; Cody can attest they are deviously perplexing.

And because he knows all these things, it is easy to see the most prized of these artifacts are strands of small, round Padawan beads, made for species who do not grow hair.

Padmé runs a finger down the seamless join between wood and metal. “Thank you, Cody,” she says.

+

Rex does not remember landing the fighter. He does not remember running but his feet must have carried him there. He does not remember pulling her from Skywalker’s arms but he remembers pressing his fingers to her neck and ear to her breast, and there is nothing.

“Ahsoka,” he’s saying, “Ahsoka. Ahsoka.” The air is charred, from the fields of lava, from her seared clothing. He’s seen thousands upon thousands of his brothers lie still like this.

Then her chest heaves once with effort, the weight of air too much to carry, and the moment of dread emptiness is replaced with one of urgent fear.

“There’s incoming hostiles,” says a familiar voice, roughened by soot.

Rex wrenches his head up to look at General Kenobi, and says “You should be dead.”

“It’s the Sith Lord, Chancellor Palpatine,” says Kenobi. “I’ll —”

“No, I will,” says Skywalker, rising to his feet.

Kenobi pauses, and says with heavy regret, “I can’t let you.”

Skywalker shuts his eyes and breathes out. Instead of replying, he says, “Save them, Commander,” and shoves Rex towards the landing platform. Rex stumbles, Ahsoka cradled to his chest, and turns back towards Skywalker.

“Just end it,” says Rex. “Please.”

“One way or another,” says Skywalker grimly. “Go!”

The medkit on the ship is surprisingly well-stocked, but it was never going to be enough for two dying women. The jump to the medical station is slow, time stretching like syrup even as they hurtle past stars at the speed of light, and Rex watches the monitors decline with a fatalistic distance.

Senator Organa is there, waiting for them. Rex has nothing to spare for surprise. He says, “Please,” staggering under the weight of Ahsoka draped over his shoulders and Padmé in his arms.

Organa says, “The Jedi?” and Rex realises, as medics pry his frozen fingers from Ahsoka’s wrists, he has to go back.

There is a certain reluctance to it: Rex turns around.

As the ship comes back to the collapsing facility, the billowing smoke of the destroyed shuttle on the landing platform makes it impossible to see the status of the men he had left behind. Rex slides down the ramp, pistols primed.

“Rex,” says Skywalker, emerging from the rubble, dragging a still body in a black robe. His voice is hollow. “I thought — you’d kill me. Maybe you should.”

“Don’t get me wrong, General,” says Rex. He notes his hands are still shaking. “Give me one more reason to shoot and I will.”

“You are a better man than I will ever be,” says Skywalker. 

“Don’t you dare,” says Rex, cutting him off. “The Commander was willing to die so you could be the best damn man in all the galaxy, and so help me —”

Anakin Skywalker just stands there, stricken, the corpse of the Sith Lord at his feet, and Rex wants to punch him, shake him, pull him into shape, rest a comforting hand on his shoulder. Tell him _Ahsoka Tano was too good for you_ , tell him _She would be proud of you_.

Instead, he slides an arm around Kenobi to help him aboard the ship. There will be no more bodies here today, not if he can help it.

+

Cody strides out to the balcony, Coruscant’s subdued skyline impersonal, uncomforting, grey. The still air is barely a reprieve from the overcrowded medbays.

“Don’t say it,” warns Cody. 

“I would never,” says Obi-Wan, half a step behind, the flippancy of their days on the front lines gone. Cody hasn’t seen it for a while; certainly not since the end of the war, and perhaps — never again, although it is surely too early to think of that, and the thought is bleak. 

Melodrama does not suit him. But events that might have once seemed theatrically exaggerated have played out on the stage of galactic politics to the ruin of almost everyone, and Cody feels adrift. At least here, now, Obi-Wan is serious. 

“You’re thinking it,” says Cody. It had not been so long ago when he thought the Jedi were all-powerful mystics, master duelists and spiritual philosophers. He thinks none of these things now. Were he that he knew Obi-Wan less well. 

Obi-Wan’s silence is an admission of guilt.

“May I remind you,” Cody says. “If I had not missed, you would be dead. _Obi-Wan,_ ” he says for emphasis, “ _you would be dead._ ”

It was just _Obi-Wan_ now, after all. The Grand Army had disbanded with little fanfare, and what chaos there might have been had been reined in by the righteous anger of the clone commanders, dechipped and furious.

Cody had not lived through war and mind control to be bested by self-recrimination. He faces Obi-Wan, reproach on the tip of his tongue. “Ahsoka — was not your fault.”

“No,” agrees Obi-Wan. “That does not change anything.”

Perhaps Obi-Wan wishes Cody knew him less well, too. Before this, Cody might have turned around and walked away, eased the pain of knowledge with distance and formality. But the end of the war exposed a fragility in Obi-Wan that Cody had always suspected, and it seems heartless to chip at the fracture points in the facade that is single-handedly holding up the remnants of the Jedi Order.

Cody knows what it is like to feel undeserving of forgiveness. It had been a simpler time, when all that had happened was that he had tried to kill Obi-Wan and not quite succeeded.

+

The lights in the emergency medical wards are dim; not for comfort but expediency. The Temple had transformed in hours, itself the site of a bloody battle, and then not much later, the refuge to which the tatters of the Jedi Order had limped. 

Even now, the Halls of Healing do not rest, and the surrounding galleries and rooms are crammed with rows of orderly but makeshift beds and bacta tanks, backup power rerouted through the sublevels as Temple engineers struggle to assess the damage to the mains systems. Their blue light casts an eerie glow on Cody’s vambraces as he approaches, the only part of his armour Rex had salvaged for him. 

They had pulled him from the milling confusion that had been the Utapau system, and upon waking Cody had stripped pieces of armour from his body and flung them aside with a violent disgust. His next move had been to commandeer the bridge, and within the hour there had been a tight rotation of brothers moving through surgery and negotiations for supplies with Utapau’s people. Cody had not moved from the command post until Kenobi, dishevelled, had shouldered his way through from the hangar, still trailing ash from Mustafar. The sharp skid of his spacecraft, a non-reg model he’d acquired at the medical station, had left lingering smoke; the coating of its landing gear had vaporised with a protesting screech against the hangar bay floor, the whole body tilted alarmingly with the force of too-sudden deceleration.

That had been a Skywalker landing, if Rex had ever seen one —

Rex wills away a moment of hurt and jealousy and watches Ahsoka’s breath fog the mask across her face. He wonders, idly, what it might be like, now he has set down his weapons of war, to not pick them up again. 

It would be easy. 

“I’m sending you with Padmé and the children,” says Cody. 

“You’re not my commanding officer any more,” says Rex, tiredly. “Stop telling me what to do.”

“Fine,” says Cody, unperturbed. It was fair to say he had probably faced worse than a weary brother too stubborn to leave Medical. “There are two babies and Padmé needs to sleep more than three hours a night. Are you going to help her, or not?”

“Getting people to sleep more than three hours sounds like a job for you,” points out Rex.

Cody rolls his eyes. “I need someone I trust to keep them safe.”

There’s something in his voice that’s at odds with his words. Rex turns to look, really look at Cody, who had barely laid down his arms and armour before picking up the mantle of clone representative, Jedi liaison and defacto uncle. Not to mention his full-time position as Chief Obi-Wan Wrangler, a role he had inherited from — Skywalker — the day the fool had been Knighted and received his own command.

Which had included Rex. Rex remembers that day well. He had not seen Cody for months, their deployments systems apart, but that day — Cody’s comical look of despair is tucked in a corner of his mind, a stark contrast to Anakin’s gleeful smile as he slaps Cody on the back and says, _Good luck, Commander_ , and turns to Rex with a firm handshake. _Captain._

Rex opens his mouth to say, _I need to be here, in case she wakes up,_ and realises that Cody knows that.

Cody wants him to be here as much as Rex wants to be here. In the Temple. On Coruscant. But he would never say something as self-centred as _I need you here_ , whether or not it was warranted or deserved. Cody, after all, has never done anything that was not for the greater good of the Republic. 

“Come on,” says Cody, hand on his arm, hauling him to his feet, taking mechanical steps away from Medical and towards the emergency sleeping quarters. Rex has been there so infrequently, he doesn’t even know which bunk is his, but Cody directs him with a confidence that comes from managing an army of a hundred thousand.

There is an unusual and wild internal conflict in Cody’s eyes. Rex is absurdly pleased, for one glorious petty moment, that he’s up there next to the Republic on Cody’s list of priorities, and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep achieved only by utter exhaustion.

The thought stays with him. Clones did not want things, things other than to see the suns of unfamiliar systems rise after a dark night lit only by blaster fire and detonators. But Cody —

Cody wants him to be by his side, brothers back-to-back in this uncharted post-war world. Cody wants him to be with the twins, small and helpless, witnesses to the brighter futures painstakingly crafted with the blood and tears of his people. 

Cody wants Ahsoka to wake up.

Cody wants more things than he would ever burden Rex with. Rex punches the panel to Cody’s quarters and steps inside.

“I’ll go,” says Rex. “Not because you told me to. Because I want to.”

“Glad we’re clear,” says Cody, not looking up from his datapad.

“Always got to get the last word in, don’t you —” says Rex with a half-hearted kick at Cody’s chair.

“I’ll come back later,” says Kenobi, from the door.

“Rex was just leaving,” says Cody smoothly. “Senator Organa’s transport is scheduled for tomorrow. Bay seven, thirteen hundred hours.”

“Take care of him,” says Rex, loudly, just to see the tips of Cody’s ears flush red. It’s the most he and Kenobi have said to each other since they confessed their failings and regrets in the ragged aftermath of Mustafar. “He likes to worry.”

“I know,” says Kenobi, that sardonic half-grin on the edges of his lips. He pauses, then adds quietly, “You can count on me.”

There was a time when Obi-Wan Kenobi would not have hesitated to pledge a guarantee of safety. “I know,” says Rex, and fights the unnatural sensation of turning his back on his brother with an unfounded conviction that it will not be forever. 

+

“Awake again?” says Obi-Wan’s voice, throaty with disuse. It is, after all, long past the last bell and not far from the first. At least his former general no longer pretends he had been asleep.

There is nothing for Cody to say, least of all to Obi-Wan. Rex’s steady presence, somewhere in the Temple, by Ahsoka’s bedside, is sorely missed. Rex knew what it was like to shoot at a Jedi with intent to kill. 

There must be a tell, somewhere on his infamous deadpan face, because Obi-Wan does not offer him a cup of tea.

“Let’s go for a walk,” suggests Obi-Wan instead, as he had been wont to do when Cody used to tally the lists of his dead brothers endlessly into the night, double-checking _MIA_ , _KIA_ before trooper requisitions were filed. Cody stands, chair scraping loudly on the flooring. He stops. 

“Come on,” says Obi-Wan, and draws his hood over his face.

He follows, as he has since the start of the war, and the end of it. The Temple is gently silent, other figures passing respectfully by. Footsteps are muffled by the curve of the walls and arches, but Cody has no eye for the grace of architecture tonight.

They stop. They are in a large room with high ceilings. The walls and floors are scuffed and there are worn lines drawn about the boundary; Obi-Wan paces them with measured steps, then cuts to the centre of the room and turns to face Cody. He pushes the hood back to fall against his shoulders. 

“This is the first form of Shii-Cho,” he says, realigning his feet into what Cody recognises as the most elementary of ready stances. 

Cody wishes for the days where he could have said, _Sir?_ and received a moderately satisfactory answer in return. He blinks slowly, and a conspiratory spark lights somewhere deep in Obi-Wan’s eyes.

“Here, and here,” says Obi-Wan, moving Cody’s hands, uncurling Cody’s fingers into the open-palm style favoured by many Force-wielders. “For now, just follow.”

There are still nights where he wakes up gasping, Obi-Wan’s name locked in his throat and a phantom voice whispering through the blinding headache. On those nights he slides to the floor and presses his forehead to the cool, smooth surface, wanting with unreasonable desperation to check if Obi-Wan were still breathing as he had been just hours ago.

There are nights that follow days where Obi-Wan says little and eats less, and Cody dozes uneasily at the small kitchen table, knowing Obi-Wan could slip past him if he wanted. He is yet to wake there in the morning; a light touch on his shoulder will startle him to wakefulness in the dark, and the firm suggestion to retire properly is always belligerently challenged on both sides. 

(“How am I supposed to sleep when you’re not taking care of yourself —”

“I fail to see how sleeping in a chair is anything more than blatant hypocrisy —”)

It ends with the kettle put to boil, or the path well-tread to the dojo.

“You’re in a melancholy mood,” says Cody, slowly rotating his wrists and stretching the muscles in his forearms. There are too many reasons to begin guessing. The reparations bill had stymied in the Senate earlier that day, and Obi-Wan had spent much of the evening making calls in multiple languages and typing frantically. The healers had declared Ahsoka’s body almost healed, but could not explain her unconscious state. The twins, according to Rex, had started teething.

“We’ve done the first three forms,” says Obi-Wan, staring at the architraves, eyes unfocused. 

“There’s room for improvement,” says Cody cautiously. Despite his extensive and well-practised hand-to-hand combat repertoire, Jedi younglings drill these kata for years before they —

Cody instinctively catches the saber that Obi-Wan throws at him.

It would be disrespectful to drop it, but Cody can’t help the thrill of shock that runs through his body. The hilt is solid, plain, well cared for. It hums with its heart of kyber, a power Cody has only ever felt through Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.

“I can’t,” says Cody.

“You can,” says Obi-Wan, serene for the first time today. 

He should have seen this coming. His godsforsaken General —

“Listen to me, Cody,” says Obi-Wan. “Do you want this?”

_This_ is a weapon. _This_ is an ancient art form Obi-Wan holds so dear. _This_ is finally, after all these years, a chance to learn something for the sake of it, a choice on which no lives hang in the balance. 

“Yes,” says Cody, and finds it to be true. 

Obi-Wan waits.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” says Cody stiffly, and it sounds childish and strange, holding a youngling’s training saber against one of the Order’s finest. 

“I promise,” says Obi-Wan, a second training saber in his hand, unignited. “I won’t let you hurt me.”

Obi-Wan, after all, knows what Cody’s nightmares are made of. Cody falls asleep as the sky lightens, with the weight of the training saber a phantom presence in his fingers, and a wistful surety that it had been the first time Obi-Wan had held a lightsaber since Mustafar.

+

“Can we play Gundarks and Pirates?” says Luke, breathing heavily. He’s lying on his front, on the floor; Leia is sprawled across him on her back. After breakfast, the twins had asked Cody when he was leaving, and had been apparently dissatisfied with his answer. They had then said some quiet things to each other, unintelligible to Rex. Next, they suddenly started laughing so hard they had fallen to the ground and couldn’t move.

Cody had watched it all with a bemused expression on his face. Rex is finding this highly entertaining.

“What have you been telling them, Rex?” says Cody with faux exasperation. Leia and Luke giggle some more.

“Oh, I have some pretty good stories,” says Rex ambiguously. “Don’t I?”

The twins nod obligingly. “I like the one with the evil slave queen,” says Leia, rolling off Luke and sitting upright.

Cody shoots him a mildly horrified look. “Rex.”

“Cody teaches lots of children like you,” says Rex, ignoring him. “What happens to the naughtiest children who don’t go to bed on time?”

He can see Cody give in. “We feed them to the gundarks,” he intones in his deepest voice, and makes a sudden grab for Luke’s ankles. The twins scream and scramble away from him, laughing. 

“I promise, I promise,” shrieks Leia, dancing away. “No, don’t eat me!”

Luke has already moved on. “Save me!” he says imploringly to Rex, holding his arms up.

Rex hums, and crosses his arms. “I don’t know, will I?”

Luke yelps and slides underneath the table, away from Cody’s long-armed reach. “You gotta. You’re the pirate captain!”

Rex sighs dramatically. “I suppose I need some pirate younglings,” he says, and scoops Luke up, holding him upside down. Luke is whooping in delight. 

“Me too!” yells Leia, and dives at him. Rex executes a well-practised one-arm catch, and the twins are laughing uncontrollably. 

Cody looks at him, and the children, who pause their mirth to stare at Cody with big wide eyes. “Can I join the pirate crew, too?” he asks plaintively. 

That sets off the twins again, as Rex lowers them to the ground. “Okay,” says Luke, struggling to put on a serious face. “But you have to be nice to us.”

“All right,” agrees Cody. 

“And you can’t leave us,” says Leia seriously. “Pirates are pirates for ever.”

Rex looks at Cody’s open expression. “All right,” says Cody.

Restlessness is not an affliction unique to him, Cody knows. The twins had cajoled from him a story, and after some pondering he’d described his and Obi-Wan’s meandering path through Ragoon-6. His vivid descriptions of the people and scenery had caught their attention, and then lulled them to sleep. 

(“I’m impressed,” Rex had muttered, under his breath.)

“G’night, Uncle Cody,” Luke had said, muffled, and Leia had echoed him as she wiggled under her blankets. “Love you.”

That had been hours ago, and Cody slides to his feet, bare against the floorboards. The dead of the night is the same everywhere. 

Rex is sitting cross-legged in the corridor outside Luke and Leia’s room, seemingly at ease despite the chill in the air, and definitely not where he had gone to sleep. His eyes are shut and his breathing is even, but the tenseness in his back tells Cody Rex is just as good at pretending as everyone else. 

He ghosts his hand fondly over Rex’s hair, not quite a ruffle. Rex’s hair is longer than he’s ever seen it, cropped neatly at his ears and nape but elsewhere a messy flop brushing at his eyebrows, softening the sharp lines of his face. 

The end of the war had given them all this chance for — softness. And the following years had only shown that no one knew quite what to do with it. Cody snorts wryly at the thought. 

He ducks through a solid door branching off from the small laundry, its ungainly latch groaning with rust as he lifts it up and lets it fall shut behind him, and steps through the only other door in the hallway.

“I was wondering,” says Cody, leaning against the door frame.

“Did you lock the door?” says Padmé, without turning around. A blaster pistol is in pieces in front of her, and she starts fitting it back together. The smell of ozone is in the air.

“Yes,” says Cody. “Rex is with the children. They’re still asleep.”

“It doesn’t — feel as comforting as I think it will,” says Padmé, staring at the blaster, whole. It is a Naboo model, sleek. Deadly, with aim like Padmé’s. “It never does. Sometimes, I wonder —” She cuts herself off. 

“Don’t we all?” says Cody. 

“Don’t we all,” says Padmé, in quiet defeat.

“Would you like to try something?” says Cody. “It’s a little different from the firing range. We run classes for the children now. But lately, we’ve had a lot of veterans and refugees join us. Rex mentioned — you still have trouble sleeping.”

Padmé smiles at him, exhausted, strong. “Lead the way.” 

Cody reaches out, and uncurls her grip on the blaster into an open palm. “It starts like this.”

+

Cody lets himself in quietly, as he always does, and Obi-Wan is waiting for him, as he always is. 

“Welcome back,” says Obi-Wan, and holds himself very still as Cody presses a chaste kiss to his cheek. 

“From Luke and Leia,” he says, solemn, and draws back slightly, innocent in the face of Obi-Wan’s carefully composed expression. “They enjoyed the meilooruns very much, and would like to know when you’re visiting next.”

Obi-Wan says, “That can be arranged. There is something else.” His tone is questioning.

“Rex called me a coward,” murmurs Cody. “And Padmé laughed at me.”

“Imagine that,” says Obi-Wan, at least a little flustered, so Cody leans back in to say, “I won’t stand for it,” soft against the corner of Obi-Wan’s mouth.

+

Rex knows, Obi-Wan’s wound alone would not have been fatal, because he had never wanted to kill Anakin. Anakin had not shown him the same courtesy in return, and it is a miracle they did not have more bodies than those that had littered the grounds of the Temple, those that lay betrayed across the Republic’s battlegrounds, and those Rex had held in his own hands.

Once, he would have wondered what it would take to end the war, and now he knows it seems churlish to think it hadn’t been worth it.

_“Maybe some good came of all this,” said Ahsoka wryly, the last moments before the world had ended._

Luke and Leia are wondrous and strange, slow to outgrow childhood and painfully genuine. Today, they are exploring the wild garden outside Rex’s home, as if they had not run about its haphazard circumference since the day they could walk. He takes a moment to appraise the meiloorun seedlings with a critical eye, from where they are hesitantly but surely sprouting in the sheltered corner near the wall. He’ll have to transplant them to bigger pots, soon. If they outlast the frost, he’ll — maybe it was time he went back to Coruscant.

Padmé’s children are watching him with big, wide eyes. The last he’d looked, they’d been chasing an early-season glacier-bee, come down from the fjordlands. He coughs self-consciously. 

“Can we play the tree game?” asks Leia. 

“Sure,” says Rex easily, and lowers himself to the grass, laying his palms on his knees. He exhales slowly, and as always, Ahsoka’s voice rises unbidden. _I am one with the Force._

Luke and Leia are earnestly babbling to each other about what the trees are saying to them. Rex would normally listen to their high, excited voices, ask after their favourite plants, discuss how the garden should be rearranged come spring, but there is a staticky buzz in his head.

“Shh!” says Leia suddenly, and to Rex, the abrupt silence rings in his ears.

_The Force is with me._

He needs to go back.

He tells Padmé he’s leaving when he returns the children, assures her there has not been an emergency, and only stops at his house to find his identity docs. He pauses in the kitchen, eyes catching on the last harvest of saskar-berry, drying from a hook on the ceiling. Padmé had lifted a giggling Luke to place it there, fresh-cut from the tree outside. _Bail said it’s a ward against bad luck,_ she had said, but there had been a twinkle in her eye. _We need all the luck we can get._

He slides the smallest cutting from the bouquet.

Rex flings open his front door with a sudden and uncaring urgency, only to find Cody standing outside.

“It _definitely_ hasn’t been six months,” says Rex, feeling a bit ridiculous, the twig of saskar stuffed in his coat pocket, boots half-laced.

“I brought someone to see you,” says Cody, and steps to the side. 

“Hey, Rex,” says Ahsoka.

Rex’s breath catches. 

“It’s really — me,” says Ahsoka. She is pale, her face thin, but she is smiling. 

He can’t help but step closer, fingers cupping her jaw, tracing the patterns he’d once worn to war, warm, alive.

“Rex,” Ahsoka says again, her voice shaking, and she presses a hand to her mouth. The fingers of her other hand are gentle and trembling as she brushes tears from Rex’s blurring vision. 

Rex tries to speak but nothing comes out.

She flings her arms around him and says, “I’m home, I’m home.”


End file.
